Nation: The Man Who Quit Kicking the Wall

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At a family breakfast in Atlantic City last Wednesday morning, Hubert Humphrey turned to his 16-year-old son Doug and asked:

"How would you like your Dad to be Vice President?"

"That would be swell," said the boy.

"Well," said Humphrey, "he's going to be."

As of that moment, Humphrey thought he had absolute assurance from the White House that he would be Lyndon Johnson's running mate. But before the day was out, the President, milking the last drop of suspense from a generally suspenseless convention, was to give Humphrey a few bad moments. Hubert withstood them pretty well. And why not? He had already suffered and survived many a bad moment and many a disappointment during his up-and-down political career.

Run Over. The son of a South Dakota druggist, Humphrey is an able, endlessly energetic, tirelessly talkative man with vaulting ambitions. As a student at the University of Minnesota, he was once told by a political science professor: "If God had given you as much brain as he has given you wind, you would be sure to be another Cicero." In fact, Hubert has brains to spare, a fact which helped to get him elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945. Three years later, by then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Humphrey achieved his first national notoriety. Attending the Democratic National Convention, Humphrey made a flaming civil rights speech: "The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." Returning to Minneapolis, Humphrey was hoisted in triumph on the shoulders of acclaimers. But his performance had already caused a Southern walkout and led to the Dixiecrat presidential candidacy of South Carolina's Strom Thurmond.

Humphrey won election to the Senate that year, and no sooner had he been sworn in than he rose to lace into his Senate colleagues. "What people want," he cried, "is for the Senate to function! Sometimes I think we become so cozy—we feel so secure in our six-year term—that we forget that the people want things done."

This did not endear Hubert to the Senate's senior citizens. Neither did his performance the next year, when he denounced the conservative, economy-minded ideas of Virginia's Democratic Senator Harry Byrd. In response, a score of Senators, both Democratic and Republican, stood up and, without even mentioning Humphrey's name, delivered themselves of glowing tributes to Byrd. When Hubert tried to rebut, the entire Senate walked out on him in as crushing a rebuke as any Senator has ever suffered. Later, Humphrey met Byrd by chance in a Senate elevator and remarked ruefully: "I may be a country boy from Minnesota, but I know when I've been run over by a Mack truck."